Peripheral Component Interconnect Express (PCIe) provides a standardized mechanism for connecting hardware components to a processor. One or more PCIe lanes may connect the pins or lands of a processor to various hardware components, including PCI slots that are capable of accepting add-in cards, to enable the processor and hardware components to exchange data.
Often, to enable a system to run a network protocol, an add-in network card, such as a Network Interface Card (if, for example, an Ethernet protocol is used), a Host Channel Adapter (if, for example, InfiniBand protocol is used), or a Host Bus Adapter (if, for example, Fibre Channel protocol is used), is placed in a PCI slot or as an extra component on the motherboard. The add-in network card may be used to provide the system with the network protocol functionality. However, such an arrangement requires communication through both the PCIe lane(s) and the add-in network card, introducing undesirable latency for network communication and possibly added system cost.
Improvements in running network protocols, including running network protocols over Peripheral Component Interconnect Express, are desirable.